The Party

Synopsis

If you've ever been to a wilder party... you're under arrest!

Hrundi V. Bakshi, an accident-prone actor from India, is accidentally put the name on the guest list for an upcoming party at the home of a Hollywood film director. Unfortunately, from the moment he arrives, one thing after another goes wrong with a compounding affect.

Peter Sellers. Peter frickin' Sellers. How you managed to get away with this unbelievably racist role and managed to get a laugh out of it without making the audience feel too conscious about it is a testament to your talent.

This film is unbelievably bizarre, has patches of irresistible hilarity and gives us one of the funniest waiters in a film ever. See this for previous reasons, the toilet paper scene and the bubbles at the end.

Sprawling, constantly regenerative, rethinking the possibilities of the comedic frame via the master discombobulater Jacques Tati--these are the actions constantly undertaken by chic Blake Edwards and his partner-in-crime Peter Sellers in The Party. Sellers plays an Indian extra who, after bungling the final shot of a remake of Gunga Din, is accidentally invited to a Hollywood soiree where he clearly does not belong. He bumbles, pops, and locks his way through the night, all the while trying to find a way to "fit in" with all the upper-crust white folk. When he finds no solution, he decides "Fuck it!" and creates the American equivalent of PlayTime: controlled chaos by way of loosened-up morals. There's a foiled casting couch, hicky cowboy…

Blaked Edwards sensibility meets New Hollywood, even though The Party doesn't have many obvious parallels with other American contemporaries. After all, it is aesthetically indebted to Jacques Tati (PlayTime is from 1967, by the way), only starred by Peter Sellers, with a similar anarchical presence of Pink Panther series. Edwards gags typically have a sad subtext and The Party is no different. The jokes are about a foreigner desperately trying to fit in the snobbish Hollywood elite. By the end, he will have gently dismantled it, if only for a night.

Sellers is hilarious in this personal childhood favorite. He plays an awkward and fairly incompetent character who inadvertently receives a party invitation. It's a fun film that unfortunately loses its steam towards the end. I think we can all agree the elephant was unnecessary.

When I was a younger man my dad made me a VHS tape with a few episodes of The Simpsons on it, taped off the television. Somewhere at the end of that tape was the first hour or so of this film, and I used to watch it over and over. I’d tell my friends at school about it but I didn’t really know what the film was called and no one would believe me that it even existed. It was the strangest, funniest thing I’d ever seen.

This is a guilty pleasure. It is very funny seeing peter sellers fuck up constantly, he is a comedic genius. The only problem is that there’s no conflict in this, it’s simply a man who was uninvited at this party